


Fade

by MorteLise



Category: RWBY
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 00:10:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21485131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorteLise/pseuds/MorteLise
Summary: Qrow's never believed in permanence. Summer convinces him otherwise.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 36





	Fade

Summer’s cloak was red the first time Qrow saw her, fabric soaked and face spattered with an impressive amount of already-dissipating Grimm gore.

After that dramatic first impression, his only thought as he stared at the stranger Beacon’s uppity headmaster had just mandated would be his new partner was _Well, at least she knows what she’s doing and isn’t as prissy as those other kingdom toadies_.

“I think you got a little something on you there,” he said, leaning against his scythe, and she laughed, grey (_silver_) eyes still bright with victory and adrenaline.

“Not for long! Check it out,” she said, spreading her cloak with a little demonstrative flare as the Grimm gore continued to flake away and drift into the wind, the deep red fading back to white in stages. “Cool, right?”

It was, kinda.

“Is it worth all the bleach you need?” he asked, and she laughed again.

“Absolutely,” she said, watching the dust stream through her fingers, her cloak shedding its last few stains. “I just—it’s a good reminder, you know? We last; they don’t.”

Qrow snorted. “Tell that to the corpse of the next Grimm victim you see,” he said, and she frowned.

“Yeah, but—that’s still something left behind, for people to mourn, to avenge. The Grimm just—are, and then they aren’t; they murder and rampage and destroy but when they die they don’t leave anything behind the way we do. We build, we bleed, we bond, and we leave legacies to follow. They can tear down as much as they want but people have the records and descendants and will to rebuild.” She gave a little twirl in her now-spotless cloak and flashed him a smile. “And meanwhile they’re just dust on the wind.”

He’d told himself in the moment that her speech didn’t matter—just the cheesy waffling of some idealistic sucker who actually believed in whatever bullshit Beacon was trying to sell—but the image was so bright it seared itself into his eyes.

Summer standing there, radiant and white. Brilliant and shining in the sunlight.

_We last._

But then and there it’d been just a moment, one Summer broke as she clapped her hands together, her face fallen in self-conscious embarrassment. “Anyway!” she’d chirruped, too loud and forced. “That got heavier than I wanted it to and we have an exam to finish! Where do we—is it that way? Are the relics—”

And Qrow had rolled his eyes and kept walking, the spell broken. He did his best to dismiss it as a party trick she’d put too much effort into, but it’d stuck with him anyway.

Red, fading to white. Summer radiant and smiling.

_We last._

-

(It took a sloppy kill, to keep a Grimm around long enough to shed that much of whatever they had stuffed inside them. The kind of haphazard, rookie techniques that Qrow had seen a lot of in the Branwen tribe, and all over the place with his fellow first years in their first few months of school.

If you’d done it right, there wasn’t enough Grimm left over for a stray smudge, let alone Summer’s little magic trick.)

-

_We last_, Qrow found himself remembering every now and then, and in the beginning the reminder made him scowl.

Nothing had lasted for Qrow in the Branwen tribe. Not with their lifestyle, and definitely not with what the tribe had lovingly referred to as Qrow’s curse.

(As much as he’d hated class, sitting down and learning about Semblances had been an epiphany; connecting the dots and realizing misfortune was something he had and not something he was. And all that talk about _training_ and _development_ and _control_ over their own so-called special talent made him think for a while there he had a shot—but then maybe the tribe had been right about what it was after all.)

Anything built could be broken down. Usually a lot faster than it’d taken to build, too. Towns, trust—even the tribe’s own camps, dismantled and collapsed for travel whenever the Grimm started edging too close.

And for everything else, there was his particular brand of misfortune. The best laid plans, and all that.

So Qrow had learned to embrace destruction—accept it, revel in it, even—as an integral part of life. Everything had shatterpoints ready to bring ‘em crashing down, if you knew where to look.

Ruin had the kind of inevitability that growth only wished it had a shot at.

(And ruin was what he and Raven had come to learn at Beacon anyway.)

But Qrow hadn’t expected Summer Rose.

Indomitable, untouchable Summer, with her white cloak and bright smile and sunny attitude and as if those hadn’t been enough the fucking Grimm-obliterating laser eyes she’d gotten halfway through their second year.

She’d been as shocked as any of them the first time, as the light had faded and the petrified Grimm had cracked and shattered into nonexistence.

But Qrow had looked at her, her optimism somehow made manifest in the middle of what should’ve been a hopeless fight—routine search and destroy gone bad, three guesses on why it’d gone so far south and the first two didn’t count—and that time when he remembered red fading to white and _We last_, he wondered if she might’ve been on to something there.

And it’d been all downhill for his ingrained cynicism after that.

Summer had been the catalyst—she was magnetic that way; drawing the eye, drawing attention, and welcoming it all as an opportunity to do something to help. And of course through Summer and her relentless team building Qrow and Raven had no choice but to let in Taiyang, the guy with a heart so big and bonfire warm that even Raven had ended up melting from it.

And then there’d been Ozpin, after Summer turned his piqued interest into active pursuit. Their enigmatic, friendly-yet-remote headmaster, who went from just seeming creepily invested in team STRQ to busting their entire worldview wide open once he explained exactly what Summer could do and what other things were out there in the world that could do crazier and worse. Ozpin, who Qrow had spent four years trying to figure out what con he was running by pretending to put his trust in a couple of obvious bandit spies before realizing he’d genuinely thought them a gamble worth taking, who had called Raven’s cynical bluff by giving them _fucking superpowers_, who thought and existed so far into the long term that Qrow’s Semblance registered at worst as something else to keep him on his toes. Ozpin, who’d given them a mission and purpose so goddamn noble Qrow thought he might actually have a shot at some sort of karmic redemption.

So when graduation was coming up and Tai and Summer started talking about “after” and “home” and “family,” Qrow’s token reminder of the tribe’s ingrained warning about how building would invite ruin was interrupted by _We last_ and that time he thought—maybe.

Turned out they could build a lot on maybe. That home and family and after Tai and Summer had talked about—and never in a million years had he expected to have Yang in his life.

(Tai and Summer had been shockingly, overwhelmingly accepting of Qrow’s Semblance when he finally came clean, telling him he was worth the risk. And they never did anything to make him believe otherwise, up until he saw that familiar dark wariness creep into Taiyang’s eyes the first time he held Yang. Hard to blame him, really.)

But maybe still didn’t build enough to keep around Raven. Raven didn’t believe in maybe, didn’t believe in that level of risk; didn’t, in the end, believe anything the tribe hadn’t told her, and when she walked out on their team and her daughter and technically the fate of the whole goddamn world Qrow had called her a few things he knew he couldn’t take back. And in response she’d called him a few things he had the feeling she’d been holding on to for a while.

And Qrow had fully expected things to collapse after that, kicking himself the whole time for ever thinking it could work—Taiyang broken-hearted, Yang motherless, the team divided, Ozpin left with Remnant’s shittiest consolation prize getting stuck with the idiot bad luck charm over the portal-generating strategist—but it hadn’t.

Summer, again.

Summer stepping in to comfort Tai, Summer caring for Yang like she’d been made for motherhood, Summer convincing Qrow they could rebuild their lives stronger than ever with just the three of them, Summer buckling down in the field as she helped Qrow fill in the hole Raven had left in the inner circle so well that Ozpin never said a word of complaint about what he’d lost.

Summer still throwing herself into the darkest corners of what their lives had to offer and walking out spotless.

_We last_, she’d said, and they really had.

They really were.

They were building something they were strong enough to protect—a family, a career, a life—they had a quaint cabin home in Patch and each other to lean on and a world to save and Qrow was going to be the_ best damn uncle_ to his two perfect nieces.

There was still darkness in the world, always. Qrow had never forgotten that, especially when he had his own personal reminder on standby. But it wasn’t something he had to get swallowed up by anymore, not with people who loved him and Ozpin with his plan to drive it back and Summer carrying with her a light so bright no darkness could touch her—

-

Summer’s cloak was red the last time Qrow saw her, and the only color it faded to after was rust.


End file.
